It’s a good time for figuring out where you’ve been and where you’re going. If you’re trying to get a grip on your time and your life, setting aside time each week to ask these questions is one of the best strategies you can use.

But what if you’re already in the habit of carving out time to plan? Here are five tweaks that I think can make a weekly check-in even more productive.

You can do a weekly check-in whenever. I used to do it on Sunday night. That’s better than Monday. When people plan on Monday, they waste most of Monday, and since no one works that hard on Friday, you end up with a pretty short week.

But when I interviewed David Allen, he mentioned that lots of people do this on Friday, and I realized that was a much better option. Doing a weekly review on Friday means I can enjoy my weekend because I have a plan for tackling Monday. It turns what might be wasted time (Friday afternoon, when everyone starts dragging) into useful time.

The team at productivity app IDoneThis has convinced me that the "done" list is as critical to productivity as figuring out what you still need to do. Some 41% of items on to-do lists never wind up happening, and yet the world keeps moving forward.

Something is happening, and often something good! So look back at what you’ve accomplished over the previous few days. Celebrate your progress. Make a note of things you’ve learned that you can incorporate into the coming week’s plan.

Hopefully you’ve already thought about your big professional and personal goals for the year and broken those big goals down into steps. As you look forward to the coming week, choose a few of those steps to block into your calendar. Giving activities a time slot greatly increases the chances that they happen.

A week has 168 hours. You’ll probably be sleeping and showering for at least 56 of those. Stuff will come up that you’ll need to address. If your priority list requires you to do more than five substantive professional tasks and three substantive personal ones per day, you will find yourself re-enacting the exact same weekly review next week, wondering what went wrong.

Here’s the fun part of the weekly review. Once you’ve figured out your tasks for the next week, you’ll notice that some are pretty simple: email a few people, schedule that dentist appointment, sign up for that 5K in two months. The upside of doing your review on Friday is that you still have time left during business hours to knock off a few of the next week’s priorities before the week even starts. We spend so much of life feeling behind. It’s nice to feel ahead of the game for a change.

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Great suggestions. When celebrating, I also like to record what worked to achieve that result. I don't just focus on the strategy, but the my way of being, my mindset, and the circumstances. The more time I give to this process, the more information I get on what makes me successful.